More  Critical Survey of Poetry: British, Irish, & Commonwealth Poets Thomas Traherne by John Thomson Other literary forms The reputation of Thomas Traherne (truh-HURN) is based primarily on his religious w orks, both in poetry and prose. His treatises include Roman Forgeries (1673); Christian Ethicks (1675); and the meditation Centuries of Meditations (1908). His w orks have been collected as The Works of Thomas Traherne (2005-2009). Achievements Thomas Traherne is usually categorized w ith the seventeenth century , Table of Contents although his poetry lacks the quality of w it that characterizes ’s and ’s w ork. His poetry is religious and philosophical and bears closest comparison w ith that Other literary forms of , to w hom it w as attributed w hen first discovered in a London bookstall in Achievements 1896. Plato is the ultimate source of Traherne’s thinking, both in verse and prose, and his w orks demonstrate his reading of many other w riters in the Platonic tradition, including Saint Augustine, Biography Saint Bonaventure, Marsilio Ficino, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, and the . Analysis Scholars have generally judged Traherne to be more interested in philosophy than poetry. Perhaps as a consequence, his prose w orks have received more critical attention than his Search for religious truth poetry, especially Centuries of Meditations, a devotional w ork in the Anglican tradition of Centuries of Meditations Lancelot Andrew es and Donne. Christian Ethicks, published the year after Traherne’s death, w as the only systematic treatise intended for the educated English layman to appear in the thirty Christian Ethicks years follow ing the Restoration. Because of the attention he paid to infant and childhood Traherne’s Poems of experiences and the importance he ascribed to them in the development of an understanding of Felicity divinity, Traherne has been suspected of the Pelagian heresy (w hich denies the doctrine of Original Sin). His name is frequently linked w ith such Romantic poets as and William Critical reception Wordsw orth, w ho also praised childhood innocence as the state in w hich humans are most Bibliography closely in touch w ith the eternal. Biography The few bits of information know n about Thomas Traherne’s life come principally from John Aubrey’s Miscellanies (1696), w hich reveals that Traherne w as tw ice visited by apparitions, and from Anthony à Wood’s Athenae Oxoniensus (1691-1692), w here he is identified as a son of John Traherne, a shoemaker w ho w as related to Philip Traherne, tw ice mayor of . Traherne also had a brother Philip, w ho revised and edited some of his poems. Traherne w as educated at Brasenose College, Oxford, w here he took his B.A. degree on October 13, 1656. He w as ordained and, on December 30, 1657, w as appointed to the Rectory at Credenhill, County Hereford. While at Credenhill, Traherne became spiritual adviser to Susanna Hopton. She had become a Roman Catholic after the execution of Charles I but rejoined the after the Restoration and became the center of a religious society for w hich Traherne w rote Centuries of Meditations. Hopton’s niece married Traherne’s brother Philip. Traherne returned to Oxford to take his M.A. on November 6, 1661, and his B.D. (Bachelor of Divinity) on December 11, 1669. In 1667, he became chaplain to Sir Orlando Bridgman, Keeper of the Seals in the Restoration. Traherne’s death occurred three months after his patron’s, and he w as buried beneath the reading desk in the church at on October 10, 1674. Roman Forgeries, the equivalent of a modern B.D. thesis, w as his only w ork published in his lifetime, although he w as preparing Christian Ethicks for publication at the time of his death. There may yet be more w orks of Traherne to be discovered; manuscripts of his w orks have come to light in 1964, 1981, and 1996-1997. Analysis Modern readers first encountered Thomas Traherne as a poet, and the publication of his poems fortuitously coincided w ith the renew ed interest in the seventeenth century poets signaled by H. J. C. Grierson’s 1912 edition of Donne. Although Traherne w as not included in Grierson’s famous 1921 anthology of Metaphysical poetry, he has alw ays been categorized w ith those poets, although in the second rank. Traherne might be surprised to find himself among the ranks of the poets at all, for his verse, at least as much of it as has been discovered, comprises only a portion of his know n w ritings, and there is reason to believe that he placed more importance on tw o of his prose w orks, Christian Ethicks and Centuries of Meditations. Thematically, and even stylistically, his poetry is of a piece w ith his prose, w hich deserves some consideration here, both for the light it throw s on his poetry and for its ow n sake. Widely and deeply read, intellectually eclectic, and religiously heterodox, Traherne reminds one of John Milton, w hom he preceded in death by less than a month. Both w ere modernists, sharing in the new Humanist emphasis of their era. Traherne, how ever, found a place in the established Church, something that the great Puritan poet w ould have found impossible. Traherne lacked the genius that made Milton an original, and readers of the younger poet are alw ays conscious of his debts to thinkers and w riters greater than he. He copied into his Commonplace Book from those w hom he especially admired, many of w hom are in the Platonic tradition, such as Hermes Trismegistus, w hose Divine Pymander Traherne copied in its 1657 English translation, and Henry More, the Cambridge Platonist, from w hose Divine Dialogues (1668) Traherne copied extracts. Another unpublished manuscript (British Museum Manuscript Burney 126) is know n informally as the Ficino Notebook because it consists of extracts from Ficino’s Latin epitomes and translations of Plato. It also contains a long Latin life of Socrates and an otherw ise unidentified w ork titled “Stoicismus Christianus.” Traherne’s w ritings are almost exclusively religious, and the influence of Plato, w ithout w hom Christianity w ould be a very different religion, is therefore unsurprising. What is surprising is Traherne’s apparent acceptance of Platonic doctrines usually rejected by the Christian Fathers, such as the doctrine of the soul’s preexistence, and his modification of other doctrines, such as the traditional Platonic opposition of the material and spiritual w orlds, from their usual adaptation to Christian dogma. Hints of the soul’s memory of an existence previous to the earthly one is one of the motifs in Traherne’s poetry that reminds readers of the Romantic poets, especially Wordsw orth of the “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” Were it not for the fact that Traherne’s w ork w as not discovered until nearly fifty years after Wordsw orth’s death, scholars w ould doubtless have searched for the Trahernian influence on him. In Centuries of Meditations, 3.2, Traherne marvels, “Is it not strange that an infant should be heir of the w hole w orld, and see those mysteries w hich the books of the learned never unfold?” His exaltation of infancy and childhood in particular makes him seem a precursor of the Romantic movement. Like Wordsw orth, Traherne values childhood innocence because the “Infant-Ey,” as he says in a poem of that title, “Things doth see/ Ev’n like unto the Deity.” Attributing such pow er to the child requires, as he paradoxically says, “a learned and a Happy Ignorance” and is one of the indications that Traherne believed in the preexistence of the soul. Although he never expressly states such a belief, it can be inferred from his w ritings, particularly Centuries of Meditations and Christian Ethicks, w here he discusses other aspects of Neoplatonic mysticism. On the other hand, Traherne rejects the traditional Platonic preference for the ideal w orld over the real. In fact, Traherne holds that the spiritual w orld is enhanced by its physical actualization. Another w ay in w hich Traherne departs from strict Platonism is in his conception of time and eternity. For Platonic philosophers, time is the earthly, mortal image of eternity, but for Traherne, this is part of eternity, just as the physical w orld is part of God’s unified creation. Here again, Traherne is reacting against the medieval emphasis on the opposition betw een this w orld and the next, finding instead a reconciliation. His reaction to the Aristotelian dichotomies of the Scholastic philosophers is one of the affinities betw een Traherne and the Cambridge Platonists. He also shared their distaste for the Calvinist preoccupation w ith Original Sin and, like them, focused on humanity’s potential, through the exercise of reason, to achieve happiness. In fact, as more than one scholar has suggested, Traherne’s may have been Pelagian; his heavy stress on the pow er of childhood innocence almost requires a denial of the doctrine of Original Sin. Scholar Patrick Grant asserts that Traherne’s theology is indebted to Saint Irenaeus, one of the pre-Nicene Fathers to w hom the Cambridge Platonists also looked for a method w hereby pagan philosophy could be incorporated into Christianity. Scholar Stanley Stew art finds Traherne aligned w ith the Arminians at Oxford w ho struck a balance betw een Pelagian “secularism” and Calvinistic determinism. Traherne’s emphasis on humanity’s potential for creation, w hich humanity shares w ith God, and his slight attention to sin, certainly distinguish him from Donne and Herbert. Traherne’s accommodation of less traditional religious view s probably w as one of the factors that earned for him the position as chaplain to Bridgman, w ho allied himself overtly w ith the cause and, before Traherne, had employed a Latitudinarian divine. Search for religious truth

Traherne’s approach to theology w as essentially exploratory, searching for truth rather than dogma. “Let it be your Care to dive to the Bottom of true Religion, and not suffer your Eyes to be Dazled w ith its Superficial Appearance,” he w rote in Christian Ethicks. That attitude is evident in Roman Forgeries, a polemic w ith the ostensible purpose of indicting the Roman church for its flagrant forgeries of documents and falsification of historical facts. Stew art’s book sets the w ork in the rhetorical context of the antipapist tracts of the late Tudor and Stuart dynasties, but goes on to argue the preeminent influence of a 1611 w ork by Thomas James lengthily titled A Treatise of the Corruption of Scripture, Councels, and Fathers, by the Prelats, Pastors, and Pillars of the Church of Rome for Maintenance of Popery and Irreligion. Like James, Traherne’s purpose is less to vent anti-Catholic vitriol, although Roman Forgeries observes convention in that regard, than to reexamine, scientifically, texts condemned as false, w ith an eye tow ard religious certainty. Renaissance Platonists, such as those at Cambridge and such as Traherne, asserted that humankind w as the bond of the universe, the link betw een the spiritual and the material, betw een the Creation and the Creator; that belief probably accounts for the self-centered quality of much of Traherne’s w ork, especially Centuries of Meditations. The notion of humankind as microcosm is found in many places, but a probable source for Traherne is Pico della Mirandola’s Oratio de hominis dignitate (pb. 1496; Oration on the Dignity of Man, 1940), w hich he especially praised. For Pico della Mirandola and others, w hen humanity w as created in the image of God, humans w ere also made the quintessence of the universe. Thus, although Traherne’s philosophy of life seems rather self-centered, as more than one critic has pointed out, it is possible that he w as using himself as microcosmic man. Stew art finds that the Centuries of Meditations is a self-centered w ork and yet not egotistic; rather, Traherne indulges in “a process of perfect narcissism,” for in self-love one finds the beginning of love of the universe, created by God. Centuries of Meditations

Despite Traherne’s identification as a poet, scholarly attention has concentrated on Centuries of Meditations, particularly in the years since the publication of Louis L. Martz’s tw o studies, The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century (1954) and, especially, The Paradise Within (1964), in w hich Martz places Centuries of Meditations in the tradition of the Augustinian meditative exercise. Much of Traherne’s w riting, including his poetry, derives from that tradition, including Meditations on the Six Days of the Creation (1717) and an unpublished w ork, The Church’s Year-Book. The century w as an established subgenre of the Anglican manual of meditation. Earlier examples include Thomas Wilson’s Theological Rules (1615), organized in four centuries, and Alexander Ross’s A Centurie of Divine Meditations (1646). Traherne’s w ork is divided into five centuries, all except the fifth containing one hundred short meditations. Since the fifth century ends w ith the tenth meditation follow ed by the numeral “11,” scholars have felt obliged to ponder w hether the w ork is unfinished or w hether perhaps Traherne purposely ended abruptly so that the reader (or perhaps his patron, Hopton), having become adept at meditation through studying the first four centuries, could complete the fifth meditation for himself on the forty-eight blank pages remaining in the manuscript. Such a fanciful explanation, the ultimate in self-effacement in an otherw ise self- centered w ork, seems unlikely. Some scholars have felt that the blank pages produced an eloquent silence. Indeed, Traherne w as not unaw are of the importance of silence for the mystic, as demonstrated in his poem “Silence”: “A quiet Silent Person may possess/ All that is Great or High in Blessedness.” This poem, how ever, is follow ed in the Dobell Folio by other poems, not blank pages. The most influential discussion of the source of the Centuries of Meditations is by Martz, w ho sees it as an Anglican adaptation of the Augustinian meditative mode, particularly as exemplified by Saint Bonaventure’s Itinerarium Mentis in Deum (1259, Journey of the Mind to God). Martz finds a basis for Traherne’s optimism in Augustine’s discussion of the pow er of the human mind in De Trinitate (c. 419; On the Trinity, 1873), and he identifies the Centuries of Meditations as a “confessional” w ork, moving through the three stages of confession of sin, confession of praise, and confession of faith that Augustine’s Confessiones (397-401; Confessions, 1620) moves through. Traherne’s five-part division mirrors Saint Bonaventure’s Journey of the Mind to God. Bonaventure’s journey opens w ith a Preparation, corresponding to Traherne’s first century. Traherne prepares for the meditative exercise by meditating on the cross and by introducing one of his most important images, Adam in Paradise. The central sections of Bonaventure’s w ork set forth the Threefold Way to God, w hich is accomplished by Traherne’s three central centuries. Traherne begins his contemplative journey autobiographically, draw ing in centuries tw o and three on personal experience in this w orld, taken as a mirror of the divine w orld. In the fourth century, he leaves personal experience behind and attempts to discuss the divine principles themselves. Bonaventure’s Journey of the Mind to God closes w ith a Repose, w hich corresponds to Traherne’s fifth century. Most subsequent commentators on the Centuries of Meditations pay homage to Martz, even w hen they disagree w ith him. Scholar Isabel MacCaffrey suggests that Traherne’s plan w as not simply Augustinian but Ignatian, an idea that gains support from the know ledge that Traherne used an English translation of a meditative w ork by a Spanish Jesuit in the composition of the Thanksgivings and especially in the Meditations on the Six Days of the Creation and in The Church’s Year-Book. Gerard Cox, w ho calls the application of Bonaventure and Augustine to Traherne “highly questionable,” argues instead that the Centuries of Meditations is organized according to Platonic principles derived from the Cambridge Platonists Theophilus Gale and Benjamin Whichcote. Cox, how ever, undercuts his ow n discussion by conceding that there are significant deviations from the Platonic organizing principle in the Centuries of Meditations. Scholar Richard Jordan argues for a three-part structure for the w ork, each part devoted, respectively, to the w orld, the individual soul, and God, and points out that in his promised discussion of the attributes of God, Traherne never mentions love, w hich he had discussed in relation to the other tw o topics. Century five, then, Jordan suggests, must have been intended as a meditation on God’s love. Although his three-part division of a w ork divided by its author into five parts seems strained, his explanation for the incomplete state of the fifth century is reasonable. Stew art dismisses all attempts to find or impose an order on the w ork as symptomatic of modern expectations of literature and claims that the Centuries of Meditations proceeds by accretion. Christian Ethicks

Stew art claims that basically the same principle underlies the organization of Christian Ethicks, a collection of Baconian essays on various virtues, theological and moral. Although each chapter does proceed in the exploratory fashion of Francis Bacon’s essays, each one is self-contained so that there is no particular necessity to the organization of most of the book—indeed the discussion of the cardinal virtues justice and prudence is interrupted by the discussion of the theological virtues, faith, hope, charity, and (Traherne’s addition) repentance—Traherne nevertheless sees the w hole as governed by a general purpose, as his preface “To the Reader” makes clear. One tradition from w hich Christian Ethicks derives is the gentleman’s handbook, w hich instructed Renaissance men in the attainment of the various virtues required of a gentleman. Traherne’s handbook, how ever, w ill be different. He w ill not treat the virtues “in the ordinary w ay,” he says, as that has already been done; rather, he seeks “to satisfie the Curious and Unbelieving Soul, concerning the reality, force, and efficacy of Vertue” as a means to felicity. As Carol Marks says in the general introduction to the 1968 edition of Christian Ethicks, the w ork is distinguished by “persuasive emotion, rather than intellectual originality.” Rhetorically speaking, “persuasive emotion” is an aim ascribed by seventeenth century rhetoricians to poetry, and indeed the w ork may be compared w ith Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596), w hose end w as also “to fashion a gentleman.” Traherne echoes, as w ell, Milton’s purpose in Paradise Lost (1667, 1674) w hen he says, “You may easily discern that my Design is to reconcile Men to GOD.” Spenser claimed that the virtues celebrated by his poem w ere such “as hath devised,” and Marks asserts that ethical textbooks in seventeenth century England all derived from Aristotle’s Ethica Nicomachea (n.d.; Nicomachean Ethics, 1797). Traherne’s organizational plan, how ever, as outlined in the preface, is not really Aristotelian. He divides human history into four parts, according to the “estates” of Innocence, Misery, Grace, and Glory, and assigns to each its appropriate virtues. He emphasizes in his preface his reluctance to speak of vice, claiming to be completely occupied w ith the discussion of virtues. The arduous via negativa through the circles of hell w as not for him. Rather, as Anne Ridler says in the introduction to her edition of the poems, Traherne is a “master of the Affirmative Way.” Traherne’s Poems of Felicity

Traherne’s Platonism and Neoplatonic mysticism and his interests in meditation and ethical instruction recur throughout his poetry, and, indeed, there are occasional poems scattered among the prose w orks already discussed. The only poems published before the tw entieth century are those know n as the Thanksgivings, nine psalmlike poems praising God’s creation. Traherne’s other lyrics are in tw o different manuscripts know n as the Dobell Folio, named for the bookseller w ho first identified the author, and Traherne’s Poems of Felicity, a group of poems selected and transcribed by Traherne’s brother Philip, w ho also edited them very heavily, as duplicate poems from the Dobell Folio demonstrate. He smoothed out rhythms, mended defective rhymes, regularized stanza forms, and made the expression “plainer” by substituting the literal for the metaphorical. Tw o versions of a line from one of Traherne’s best-know n poems, “Wonder,” demonstrate Philip’s method. In the Dobell Folio version, the line is “The Streets w ere pav’d w ith golden Stones.” In Traherne’s Poems of Felicity, only one w ord is changed, but it is a significant one: “The Streets seem’d paved w ith Golden Stones.” Philip has changed the metaphor into a simile, making the line safer, less bold. The Dobell Folio comprises thirty-seven poems. All but six are also in Traherne’s Poems of Felicity. The latter manuscript is, how ever, the only source for thirty-eight of its sixty-one poems. Because of the extensiveness of Philip’s emendations to the poems also contained in the Dobell Folio, the textual accuracy of the poems for w hich Philip’s version is the only source is clearly unreliable. The Dobell Folio is a holograph, so it is likely that the poems in it w ere arranged in their present order by the author. The general plan seems to be a person’s spiritual biography from infancy to maturity. The opening poem is appropriately titled “The Salutation,” although it is not a greeting to the reader, but the child’s greeting to life. Childhood innocence, especially as it resembles the state of Adam in Paradise, is the subject of the first four poems. The next six, from “The Preparative” to “The Approach,” concern w ays of coming to know God, chiefly through appreciation of his w orks, a theme that recurs throughout the poems and is frequently expressed by catalogs of God’s w orks. Traherne’s reading of philosophers and theologians is everyw here apparent, most obtrusively in a poem called “The Anticipation” employing technical terminology from the Aristotelian tradition to exploit the paradox that God is at once the end, the means, and the cause of natural law. The titles of the last eight poems in the sequence reveal Traherne’s Christianized Platonism. There are four, titled, respectively, “Love,” “Blisse,” “Desire,” and “Goodnesse,” among w hich are interposed four poems, each titled “Thoughts.” Love and desire, according to Platonic doctrine, are the forces that motivate people to seek bliss and goodness, and thoughts are the means, the “Engines of Felicitie,” to use one of his rare Metaphysical conceits. Thoughts are the means to a mystical apprehension of God, as quotations from “Thoughts: III” and “Thoughts: IV” exemplify: “Thoughts are the Angels w hich w e send abroad,/ To visit all the Parts of Gods Abode.” They are “the Wings on w hich the Soul doth flie.” Traherne’s emphasis on “thoughts” in these poems is another reminder of Traherne’s familiarity w ith the meditative tradition; scholar John Malcolm Wallace has argued that the poems of the Dobell Folio constitute a five-part meditation in the Augustinian-Jesuit tradition, as described by Martz. Whether such a process w as the poet’s intention cannot be proved. Scholar A. L. Clements has interpreted the Dobell Folio using a somew hat simpler three-part framew ork. He sees the poems moving from childlike innocence, through fallen adult experience, to blessed felicity, the traditional Christian life-pilgrimage. Scholars seem to agree, in any case, that the manuscript is a patterned w ork of art and not simply a random collection of poems. The same cannot be said about Traherne’s Poems of Felicity. There can be little doubt of Traherne’s authorship of all the poems of the manuscript, for they express the same themes and exhibit the same stylistic features as those in the holograph manuscript. Nevertheless, it cannot be said w ith certainty that choice lines are not Philip’s revisions. Critical reception

Stylistically, Traherne’s poetry has never received much critical approbation, although some recent critics have argued that New Critical tenets have made it impossible for modern readers to appreciate Traherne. Tw o primary characteristics of his poetics—his heavy reliance on abstractions and his frequent catalogs of, for example, God’s creations do not make for vivid verse. His relative avoidance of imagery is deliberate, as the w ell-know n poem on his poetics, “The Author to the Critical Peruser,” attests. Traherne specifically rejects “curling Metaphors” in favor of “naked Truth.” It may be, as some sympathetic scholars have thought, that his style represents his attempt to transcend imagistic language in an effort to apprehend Platonic ideas, but he is a difficult poet to enjoy for readers w ho have learned to admire concrete diction and sensual imagery. Such imagery as he does use is often biblical and Christian—images of light, fire, w ater, mirrors, and, from the Neoplatonic tradition, the eye and the circle. Like other contemporary Christian poets, he makes frequent use of paradoxes, a figure fundamental to Christian theology. One particularly striking hyperbolic, oxymoronic example is “Heavenly Avarice,” w hich he uses to describe “Desire” in the poem of that title. Paradoxes, like abstractions, are part of his effort to raise the mind to the level w here apparent opposites are seen to be one. In English literary history, Traherne is himself something of a paradox. He has achieved a reputation as a poet, and yet his best w ork w as done in prose. As a thinker, he did not achieve anything new, and yet his w ork demonstrates more consistently than any of the other Metaphysical poets that he w as a serious student of philosophy and religion. He w as a sort of quiet rebel, remaining in the established church and yet fearlessly examining, and sometimes abandoning, its doctrines. Traherne w as not unique; he w as very much a man of the Renaissance and Reformation; yet, to study him is to achieve a new insight into the intellectual life of seventeenth century England. Bibliography

1 Blevins, Jacob. An Annotated Bibliography of Thomas Traherne Criticism: 1900-2003. Lew iston, N.Y.: Edw in Mellen Press, 2006. This bibliography focuses on critical w orks analyzing Traherne. 2 ______, ed. Re-reading Thomas Traherne: A Collection of New Critical Essays. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2007. This volume contains nine w ell researched essays that take a modern approach to the reading of Traherne’s poetry and prose, making it more relevant in the tw enty-first century. 3 Cefalu, Paul. “Infinite Love and the Limits of Neo-Scholasticism in the Poetry and Prose of Thomas Traherne.” In English Renaissance Literature and Contemporary Theory: Sublime Objects of Theology. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Cefalu finds elements of neo-Scholasticism and Aristotelianism in Traherne’s w ritings, especially his poetry, rather than mysticism and . 4 Day, Malcolm M. Thomas Traherne. Boston: Tw ayne, 1982. Day’s study of Traherne’s meditations and poems focuses on his use of abstraction, paradox, and repetition to evoke in his readers a sight of eternity unlike the childlike vision earlier critics described in his w ork. Day provides a biographical chapter, thoughtful analyses of Traherne’s w ork, a chronology, and an annotated select bibliography. 5 De Neef, A. Leigh. Traherne in Dialogue: Heidegger, Lacan, and Derrida. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1988. De Neef’s study investigates the applicability to Traherne’s w ork of three popular theories, w ith their themes of being, psychic identity, desire, and “the discursive economy of supplementarity.” 6 Inge, Denise. Re-examining the “Poet of Felicity”: Desire and Redemption in the Theology of Thomas Traherne. London: University of London Press, 2002. Examines the religious view s of Traherne as revealed in his poetry and prose. 7 ______. Wanting Like a God: Desire and Freedom in Thomas Traherne. London: SCM Press, 2009. Inge examines tw o important concepts in the poems of Christian poet Traherne, w ho argues that w ant is the very essence of God’s being. 8 Johnston, Carol Ann. “Thomas Traherne’s Yearning Subject.” In John Donne and the Metaphysical Poets, edited by Harold Bloom. Rev. ed. New York: Bloom’s Literary Criticism, 2010. Examines the religious poetry and w riting of Traherne, focusing on w ant and yearning. 9 Sluberski, Thomas Richard. A Mind in Frame: The Theological Thought of Thomas Traherne (1637-1674). Cleveland, Ohio: Lincoln Library Press, 2008. A biography that examines Traherne’s religious beliefs through his w ritings.

Citation Types Type Format

MLA Style Thomson, John. "Thomas Traherne." Critical Survey of Poetry: British, Irish, & Commonwealth Poets, edited by Rosemary M. Canfield Reisman, Salem, 2011. Salem Online, https://online.salempress.com

APA Style Thomson, T. (2011). Thomas Traherne. In R. Reisman (Ed.), Critical Survey of Poetry: British, Irish, & Commonwealth Poets. Hackensack: Salem. Retrieved from https://online.salempress.com

CHICAGO Style Thomson, John. "Thomas Traherne." Critical Survey of Poetry: British, Irish, & Commonwealth Poets. Hackensack: Salem, 2011. Accessed April 16, 2019. https://online.salempress.com.